Soleil Ho

RACE RECORDER: AUGUST 5 2013 TO OCTOBER 15 2013

Monday, August 5, 2013 11:21 AM

maybe this would be a good intro to this piece though“…in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” – Edward Saidnot just asian cultures, but I think orientalism can extend to latin american and central american cultures, african cultures, pacific cultures. esp in food.“from the beginning of western speculation about the orient, the one thing the orient could not do was represent itself” – Said again“you figure out ways to enjoy things even as they erase you, or render you invisible.” – bao phii’m comparing asian women’s bodies to food items. not just any food items, but pan-asian food items like boba tea, sticky rice, korean bbqthe only reason those neanderthals know how to make those references is bc of americanized asian restaurants

11:49 AM

korean barbecue google analytics

12:18 PM

transethnicity – people wanting to be korean, japanese bc they like the musicusing “kawaii,” “oppan,” etc“ni hao” from strange men on the streetpeople wanting asian babies of their own, professing desire to procreate with asian person so they can have onethe fetishization of mixed race childrenthesis?: eating exotic food doesn’t make you an interesting or good personsignals sent: I’m cosmopolitan, knowledgable, adventurous, smart, open-minded

12:38 PM

hey amalia!have you ever noticed how people get really excited about talking about how they like “exotic” foodperhaps even… a little smugI’m reading this blog post by a white girl talking about phoyes tell me more about how cool you are for liking phoalso check out Jeremy Binns, whitest man on earth

12:50 PM

hey maja, so I’m trying to brainstorm for an article that I’m writingabout how people treat eating food as a gateway to cultural experiencemy question isdo you think people are still like thatit seems like there are definite class issues at play here toolike people are super into the idea of poor refugees staying in their placeand “americanized” food is demonized pretty heavily tooso it’s like they’re being punished for assimilatingit’s a catch-22, rightI feel like “adventurous” urban eaters are like parasitesonce a certain cuisine has been sucked dry of meaning, they move onto the next hitthus korean bbqpeople love when refugees are stayin poorit’s all about the white blandnessbland white american cultureI think I’m going to examine the reasons why people feel the need to embellish themselves with other people’s culturesthat might be a good angleI’m still like, why is going to a hole-in-the-wall the biggest risk you’re comfortable takingit’s also a luxury borne from being the defaultand possessing the default subjectivityI think choosing to identify as “white” is a very political choicelike, you’re allying yourself with whiteness and the construction thereoflike, you’re choosing the monolithwell, default is a symptom of capitalismright?and imperialismhahaha I get it thoI wonder if the idea of whiteness = blandness comes from imperialist rhetoricI don’t think I get what you mean by “ignorance” thenI don’t think the system of appropriation, orientalism, etc existed before capitalismyea but if you’re talking about general ignorance of like the earth being round I don’t know how relevant that isI’m talking about a certain flavor of ignorancebeing I think considering yourself a “plain old white person” is disingenuous for surehahaha that’s okspicy buffalo?like, that plainness almost acts as an opposing magnetic force that pushes you toward meaning-finding in other culturesit enables imperialist adventuringhmmmmthat’s an interesting thoughtI don’t know much about thatmaybe it’s an attempt to escape responsibilityI’m knee-deep in whiteness rhetoricI think there are better ways to atone for white guiltright??like actually doing something to help people rather than making yourself look goodindulgences used to be paid by good worksbut capitalismI think as mercantilism became a thing so did monetary donations in exchange for penance

4:14 PM

So are they calling Asian Americans “comfortable”? who felt victimized by their “art” idgi1) omg 2) “black” jesus implies that there ever was a “white” jesus >:)

Wednesday, August 7, 2013 11:02 AM

I don’t know how it feels to be white in a room full of whitesesp if you’re not aware of itI wonder what everyone in the room thinks of itI’m sure there are a lot of different feelings

I guess I should include the line, “ninja pussy I be stabbin”oh godthere is such fuckery between asian ladies and dudesI love that it’s retroactively satirical I love that the band isn’t racist because they aren’t racistsI love thatno doubtat least that is the sense that I get from drakewho is kind of an asshole about it afaiklolall rapping about ethiopian girlsno dark skinned girls tho of courseamerican racism knows no boundaries nor makes any sense

Friday, August 9, 2013 11:20 AM

It’s pretty common in fiction, too, esp w characters of color. Skin is chocolate, caramel, burnt bread but no one writes that a white character has skin like chicken breast or muffin batter!

11:36 AM

yoooo amalia this famous food writer just RTed mea tweet hating on white ppl lmaothere’s this decent article on food writers comparing food to womenI think frida kahlo wrote that everyone she met in sf had faces that looked like unbaked rollsI also got RTed last night for tweethating on mayomoreI think I have a gimmick nowheavy table did a kind of racist review of a latino placethey noted tv screens showing videos of “hoochie mamas in miniskirts” and I was like guuuuuys noooo

kind of not sure about samuelsson mandid you hear about red rooster?it’s a “soul food” resto in harlemthat neighbor ppl can’t actually eat at bc it’s too expensive and doesn’t do takeoutlmaoand it’s like, dude what what what are you doing stop

12:52 PM

omg I think I found the most racist twitter ever

1:00 PM

omg I’m working on my piece in this restoI just realized that it’s that kind of place I’m talking aboutI forgot! they’re the only coffee shop open in my neighborhood rnauuuughthey have $8 banh midude did you ever go to 20.21 at the walkerthey legit had $16 banh miI was just likewhythings don’t have to be expensive how do you improve on a banh mi that muchit’s impossibleyea, wolfgang puck can eat a dickan asian fusion dick wrapped in artisanal seaweed

1:11 PM

girl you are gonna get stopped and frisked so hardI think I’m going to do derelict for halloweenrip open a trash bag and glue actual trash to itlike I’m an inside out garbage cana metaphor for third world oppressionthe se asian woman’s body akin to the abject lol

ok so last night I was hanging with some grinnellian lesbians and they were like, ppl who hate piper from orange is the new black are self-hating white liberal arts girlsI think I hate that bc I hate the privileging of white liberal arts girl subjectivitylike why would you say thatlike is acknowledging legit hatred of her by people of color not even importantlike no one cares or wants to hear about it, the real story is white self-hatesame with girlsI don’t care about self-hate and ppl using that to guilt white people into liking a showyou know? I mean if piper and lena dunham are objects of self-hate… if they represent something real about the white liberal arts girl experience then damn, I have more hating to doI didn’t think it was that badlike ok how does it make you feel when poc make fun of white pplthey were saying that hating her is self-hatebc they are heryea I think that comes from narcissism – but what’s newI think it’s pretty damaging tbhto have a venue for exorcising white guilt w/o doing anything about it, and by supporting a mostly all-white groupat least orange is the new black gives poc jobsand exposurelike awesome now I know about samira wiley, laverne cox, etc etcgirls had like what, donald glover

Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:16 PM

Congratulations! You have won 2 White People Points for hating on Asian American women! (Redeemable for absolutely nothing.) using misogynistic and racist language against an Asian American woman.

Monday, August 12, 2013 11:33 PM

dude haven’t you heard miley totally invented africa #thanksmileytoday I’m laughing at the fact that this bitch I know called the black cat she was planning to adopt “cosby kitty”

11:46 PM

shit like this makes me so, so glad that I wasn’t born whiteI can’t even imagine the vast emptiness they must feelthe bitter taste of coleslawthat they just can’t brush outso what does your “friend” mean by “intercultural exchange”is he talking about sex with timid azn babesI want to give him a fortune cookie that comes with a message saying, “too bad you’re white”I can’t believe the hooker stereotype is still so hugeI mean I can, but seriously?I guess he’s not that good at intercultural exchange after allif he doesn’t get thatohhhh shityeah murakami’s a bit like the yellow david foster wallace in that regardbut maybe with more cred because he’s exotic?yeah seriously, the guy’s writing is probably so popular because it’s so whiteit’s good, too, but I wouldn’t underestimate the power of the beatles referenceshit it’s the same thing and our parents are the ones who’ll get shit for itthey’re not cosmopolitan or smart, they’re just FOBsno but it’s the same with everythingseriously like white boy cooks viet food, whoa how amazing! how versatile!viet person does it, well that’s certainly logical… cricketslike whoa let’s go on an adventure to their dirty hole-in-the-wall and instagram that shitwhite people can better us and our cultures, wendy. just ride the white whale~lmao sorryman, how many times have you been randomly “ni hao” on the street? ughI have still never gotten a good rationale for someone doing thatwhy is it justifiable to use when the targets for that questionare ppl marked by race?like the payoff is never anything thoughtful or fun or goodfor in my case, the followup is generally, “OH! I love pho!” like great. ok. what can I do with this.because we’re stuck on the idea that eating a cuisine = relating to the culturethat’s why there are always those nytimes flavor pieces that dissect fujianese cooking, or korean banchan, etcbecause that way you can say you know a culture w/o actually having to engage in the messy stuff of getting to know history or peopleyeahlolgotta have high standardsif you can’t have high standards, what can you havemy white husband is the result of years of careful cultivationI had to marry him because I worked so hard to make him hate white patriarchypeople like that are like millennial cometscyclical cometsyou gotta catch em while you can because they’re so rareit’s a miracle of naturehow do you not stop to wonder, why is “me love you long time” funny?why do I find it funny, and why should my asian american girl friend find it funny?but yeah like why would he do it in the first place??like ok, I understand that we are hanging on a fairly precarious moral edge here, but it still seems pretty legit to be like, how about you don’t use misogynistic, ableist, and racist language toward a person regardlesslike how about you guys try to seem a little less eager about thatVietnamese woman cut off her husband’s dick earlier this yearand I’m sure they totally ignored the fact that he was raping herI just love the super death metal detail of her putting it into the garbage disposalyupbut they have a lot more empathy for penises than women

Tuesday, August 13, 2013 3:44 PM

shit definitely go out with him if he’s a white chef cooking the flavors of the orient or somethingtoo many of my awesome girl friends are on okcupidand it’s like the quality of male humanity on there is terribleyeah, seriouslywhere are the good menI’m seriously beginning to suspect that the vast majority of men are scumbagsand that the proportion of awesomeness is very skewed towards womennot my fault you went to art school with a bunch of gay dudesand anime peoplehahahaI keep hearing these stories from my friends about datingand now I’m like, wow, every man is a disgusting beastmy friend Wendy gets all these messages where it’s like, maybe 60% of them start with “ni hao!” or “konnichi wa!”this one guy was like, “ni hao! (but not in an offensive way)”what does that even meanI feel like maybe awesome women use okc because they feel like they need dating help, when they really don’t, and awesome guys don’t use it because they’re not taught to hate themselves as muchso that’s why there are more scumbag dudes on there the proportions get all fucked uplike maybe if you want a man who wears a fedora stick with okcyeah I guess there’s less surprise racismwell maybe not true

4:39 PM

I wonder if it’s weird that all I cook at home is asian foodmaybe I have a little anxiety about being stereotypicalhahahalike I’ve eaten rice and noodles every day since I got back home*and/orlolI think I made a grilled cheese once

Thursday, August 15, 2013 11:30 PM

yooooooooo yoooooI’m drusup bro I’m drunk as fuckkkI can’t believe you know Clare! well I do believe thatthat’s awesome she went to my college, and we’re internet budsI’m just like psyched about these asian people connectsshe asked me for advice once, because our school is so damn whiteand I was like, embrace the abject. fuck with people. that’s how you maintain your sanityendless hilarityyeah, boys are so not worth the mental energy we put into themI know thowhen i like a str8 guy it’s like going through the 5 stages of grief1. denial: I can’t believe I like this dude How could I let this happen?2. anger: Why do you have to be a man? Why are you such a fucking asshole3. bargaining: I feel like I could be more ok with this if you’d go down on me more. Yeah. Ok.4. depression: why you gotta uphold the patriarchy like that tho? I can’t deal with this5. acceptance: ok fine let’s bone.also white boyslet’s be honestand it’s like, why is my body like this. why does it crave the d

Saturday, August 17, 2013 5:03 PM

I think I’m going to organize these by subject, not by person. I don’t know! I don’t know. I think Jim wants them by person though. Hmmmmmmm. Get in the zone brosephine. What’s keeping me from writing? Am I afraid that this is just cashing in on the zeitgeist, and I’m using my identity to assume a kind of authority that I am not entitled to? I mean, no, I’m still using interviews… it’s not like I’m coming down from Asian People Heaven to be like, THIS IS LAW YOU ARE BAD!! Is that what I want to say though

Monday, August 26, 2013 5:40 PM

My major critique of the story was the lack of background on what was happening with the protests, and why the town was divided as it was. Racism is usually easy to demarcate – whites against _____ – but I would love for you to complicate it more with the shades of gray that you are so good at in the rest of the story. The way you exceptionalize Joe and make him the focal point of the attention in the story – not your attention, but the town’s – is pretty problematic, and I’d like for the revised story to address the reasons why the town fixated on him, and not on the many other students in the protests.

Thursday, August 29, 2013 9:50 AM

I don’t know why anyone is terriblethat is a mysterydo you really think anyone wakes up in the morning and plans to be racist thoyeahif I’m feeling feisty I usually stop and ask, why did you say thatI often don’t thoughI feel like we deserve some kind of explanation lolyeabut I do love calling them outdrinking the kool-aid and they don’t even know what flavor it is

Sunday, September 1, 2013 6:21 PM

I definitely get where you’re coming from. While I made a huge effort to reach out to fellow QPOC at my LAC, the sheer whiteness of it all made me miserable most of the time. Do what won’t drive you off a cliff, bb girl.

ya, I had a lot of friends who went through nervous breakdowns bc my school didn’t make it easy for 1st gen or working class college kids to cope with the extremely privileged bubble they had going on

Friday, September 6, 2013 7:02 PM

hmmmas long as you are an equal opportunity racial identifier, I think it’s okyou know what I mean?or you can do as zadie smith did in NW and identify all the white people and not the restyou have a lot of freedom herethere’s like no convention of racial identifiers in literatureI think the racist ways to do it would be to only id the coloreds and also to compare their skin tones to an edible itemspeaking of which, I made a yummy dinner tonight!

Here’s the piece with a few more edits. I think that really tough paragraph (I think it’s 8?) could probably just go entirely, now that I’m looking at it with fresh eyes.

As for your suggestion regarding bringing out the “whys” a bit more, do you have any specific places where you’d want to see that? I added a few hints here and there, so if it’s still not clear enough please let me know! The little section near the end about nostalgia and what it means to trap a culture (or even a person) really applies to feminist ideas too – kind of relating subordinating a culture to a fixed point reflects how the agency of women at large tends to be subsumed under male interests. Should I spell it out, though? I kept the language there vague so that the readers could have an “Aha!” moment with it.

Thanks!

Tuesday, September 10, 2013 10:49 AM

By divorcing art from “real life,” we – by defining art as “this,” but not “that” – we are ignoring the presence of a narrative that governs our lives participating in a fantasy that disallows us from seeing the constructedness of our political, personal and personal narratives.

Thus, the question of what is or is not art is a fallacy. It implies that there are things that are untouchable vis-a-vis their “artfulness,” and so they can never occupy the extremely mutable space of the creative object. For example, our conversation in class about the difference between Walmart and the art museum perpetuates that misconception. If Walmart cannot ever be that space wherein art may take place, then we are declaring it a “safe zone” for capitalism, for heartlessness, for the things that art tends to rub up against. On the other side of the coin, if art museums are solely meant as a space wherein appreciation may take place, we are ignoring the fact of their complicity with those same things.

Both of these institutions benefit immensely from these fantasies, which preserve their respective standings within apparently opposing spheres.

In the literary world, the question of what constitutes the “literary” is also fraught with political implications. More often than not, the “genre” books that are maligned by literary personages and critics are written by people who have been traditionally stopped at the gates of that club: women, LGBT writers, working class writers and uneducated white women. In this sphere also, it is important to consider who benefits from a definition of art. Writers like Sapphire, Octavia Butler, Stephanie Meyer, and many more whose names we don’t know are not considered to be “literary” writers because they lack the qualities that have been designed to exclude them.

Instead, the crowns and the glory generally go toward a certain demographic for whom this world was created in the first place.

In addition, the writers who have to channel their energies toward their daily bread – the aforementioned copywriters, et al. – are scoffed at for prostituting their work and soiling the craft. The borders between what may constitute art and what may not function to preserve hegemonic systems of oppression. The cautious definition of art put forward by George Dickie, which purports that art is “human-made and commented upon,” ignored the fact that people may have complicated reasons for not commenting upon a work. To paraphrase a koan spoken in class, if a tree’s existence is inconvenient, does it really exist to the onlooker?

Tuesday, September 17, 2013 2:39 PM

dude I am trollbaiting some white dude on fb whytake the internets away from mehe’s on this girl’s status update about miss saigonlike instead of being like, “yea oppression is fucked up” he’s all, why u gotta use “womyn” it’s so ridiculouslike thanx for yr manpinion I guess“not to be a sexist” but I’m gonna power through anywayu mad brohahahahaha what a stupid assholetalking like no word’s spelling has ever been changed for any reason in the history of languageyou have a good point. no word’s spelling has ever been changed for any reason in the history of language, so why should those damn “womyn” or “blaques” get to do it? especially when the change fails to garner the recognition of a privileged person loland I guess nothing we do has a point if some white jerkoff from iowa doesn’t recognize it as having onew/eI love fucking with peoplewhite man dismisses anti-oppressive terminology as “silly” and unnecessary news at 11why would it ever be ok to write, “when did race come into this” on a status about how miss saigon is oppressive

3:57 PM

white tears gifwhite tears gifwhite tearswhite menno time for bullshitthat is more productive to mefucking people always being like, “please educate me” and then, “no stop you’re educating too hard”hahahahhaaI don’t want to be a total ass all over my friend’s status, but there is a wealth of gifs out there christinewhat a time to be aliveI don’t know why I choose to engage idiots on the internetbut I guess if we didn’t have that then we’d actually have to get work donealso I love how white guys always end up being like, I agree with those guys. and have zero understanding of what that implieshmmmm yeah, I wonder why all the white dudes in the convo are teaming up

Wednesday, September 18, 2013 11:22 AM

I love when white guys point to other white guys like, “I agree with this guy” and have no idea what that implies0 self-awarenessit’s all just ridiculous, fb is such a farce of human interactionbros love making shit all about themI’m so sick of these same conversations, over and over and over againtbh that’s why I’m pretty adamant about keeping things on a flippant levelI can’t invest the emotional energy in this stuff lolbecause I receive nothing for itlike, maybe pay me to educate you and I willyou know I think maybe 10% of my attraction to chris is based on the fact that I can be a dominant qwoc in a relationship with a swm10% of it is some crazy reparations shit lol

Sunday, September 22, 2013 2:41 PM

I’m tiptoeing into talking about it with my students, but it’s a tough call to make when my class isn’t necessarily a sociology course. They seemed interested in discussing it when we covered the “Trayvon Martin and I Ain’t Shit” essay by ?uestlove, so I think it’d go over well. I think a lot of people just aren’t educated in race talk, and I do want to change that (esp. since my course is a freshman one). I’m just going to make my students read a lot of things about race issues and see what happens!

4:52 PM

“black is a woman’s color” pronouns

9:12 PM

bell hooks / Gloria Watkins – author, feminist, social activist, foundational to the modern studies of race, class, and gender

– exigence helps us determine purpose in our own writing and in others’ writing

Bearing witness

– basic definition: giving testimony in court of law

– on the personal level, it means giving voice to your experiences

– we saw with Primo Levi last week

– what happens when we don’t tell our stories?

Thursday, October 3, 2013 7:04 PM

literary fiction doesn’t have a genre like white people don’t have a raceI think I’m going to write about… how white-based mfa programs stifle the creativity of everybody in them

Monday, October 7, 2013 1:41 PM

chris did you just lecture my aunt on vietnamese history

Saturday, October 12, 2013 9:27 AM

I sympathize with her for sure. but when you have privileged white people of the first world chanting, “i am malala” while appropriating the black power fist gesture on 20/20, I think it’s reasonable to think that there might be a dissonance in the girl’s intentions and the ways in which she is becoming a cause passif among white liberals.malalamalala marxist-leninistI agree that she absolutely has suffered too much, and I agree that she’s brave. she doesn’t deserve to become a watered-down version of herself, which is where I see this all going if she continues to work within the western pr machine.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013 10:20 AM

when I suggest a character could be 2nd gen caribbean (i.e. not yt), every1 at the table protests that “race doesn’t matter” #mfaproblemsall ambiguous characters are white until proven brown #mfaproblemsa “conjure woman” character has dreadlocks and lives in the tropics but some insist that “she could be irish” #mfaproblems“some readers might be alienated” if a latina character calls her grandmother “abuela” #mfaproblems

10:38 AM

but srsly last night’s workshop was excruciatingeveryone was critiquing this one story as if the protag was a middle-class white woman and I was like maybe she’s caribbean? then all of a sudden race doesn’t matteryea, the abuela thing happenedwe can’t talk about race if the race of a character isn’t whiteand then they kept throwing around words like “ethnic” and “tribal” and “nonwhite”and I was like noooooooooooooyeah, the protag also gets assaulted in the storyand these two swm in my class were like, “did it bother anyone else that these guys did XYZ? it seems really impractical” some pirates orally assaulted herlike are you kidding meRIGHT???the teacher shuts me down constantly in this class but she didn’t have anything to say to thatanywayso I’m having one-on-one conferences with my studentsand I told this one girl who was worried about her grammar that the rules are made up and enforced by white supremacists and she looked at me like O___Obut she laaaughedI tell my students all the time that it’s not a matter of grammar being correct or incorrect, but a matter of being understood by people who are already hostile to understanding you